AI bot backed by Elon Musk wins global video game competition

An artificial intelligence programme from Open AI, a research firm backed by entrepreneur Elon Musk, has beat a hundreds of players to win a world championship video game contest.

As reported by CNN, the Open AI team taught a bot to play Dota 2, an online multi-player battle game where teams compete to take down a structure in an opposing team's home base.

Explaining how the bot was trained, Greg Brockman, Open AI co-founder and chief technology officer, said that it “self-trained” until its skill level reached that of the world's best Dota 2 players.

"Our bot is trained entirely through self-play. It starts out completely random with no knowledge of the world, and simply plays against a copy of itself -- which means it always has an evenly matched opponent,” he said.

At the world championships in Seattle last week – where players comptete for a prize fund of $10.7m – the bot beat Danil Ishutin, a professional Dota 2 player who goes by the name Dendi, in two out of three rounds.

It was a landmark moment for Open AI, which has a mission to promote "responsible" AI. Musk recently said that AI is "more of a risk” to humanity “than North Korea."